Pasqual Maragall I Mira - Recent Years

Recent Years

In 1997, Pasqual Maragall resigned as Barcelona's Mayor and returned to university lecturing in Rome and New York. However, he came back to active politics and was elected as the PSC-CpC candidate for the presidency of the Generalitat in the 1999 election.

In 2000, he was elected President of the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC-PSOE), and was a member of the Catalan Parliament from 1988 to 1995. From 1999 to 2003, he presided the PSC-CpC parliamentary group.

On 16 December 2003, Pasqual Maragall was elected President of the Generalitat by the Catalan Parliament after cliff-hanger negotiations with the ERC and ICV parties. He finally took office on 20 December. While generally popular as Mayor of Barcelona, Maragall's career as President of the coalition government was marked by a series of crises. A particularly severe one involved Chief Councilor Carod's "secret" trip to France to unofficially negotiate with ETA. Others include: the stormy negotiations over a new Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia in which Maragall and the PSC hovered between a nationalist stance and caving in to central government pressure; the collapse of an entire city block in Barcelona's Carmel district following poorly-planned and executed tunnelling work; and a scheme – supported by Maragall's government – to build a tunnel for the AVE high-speed train under the shaky foundations of Barcelona's 19th-century city centre. In October 2005 Maragall met with objections regarding his plans for reshuffling the cabinet without consulting either his coalition partners or his party. Ernest Maragall, the President's brother, was tipped for a ministerial post in the reshuffle. Ernest, who was seen by critics as an apparatchik and held the post of Executive Secretary, whipped up a storm of protest in June 2005 when he opposed plans to make Catalonia's future anti-fraud department independent of the government. Pasqual Maragall's pledges to fight corruption and nepotism in public administration were one of the key planks in his 2003 election campaign.

On 21 June 2006, Maragall announced that he would not be standing for reelection (see Catalan Parliament election, 2006). He offered his support to new President Jose Montilla amongst controversy over Montilla's non-Catalan heritage stating that is did not make Catalonia "less Catalan," and later commented that "our new homeland is Europe." He later stated "our new path is the Mediterranean." On 19 October 2007, it was announced that he would not pay his PSOE membership fee anymore, ending three decades of activity within the party. The following day, he announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.